While the Obama administration insists the Mexican border is secure, a sophisticated airborne radar system created to track Islamic terrorists shows that less than half of the migrants and smugglers crossing into the United States get caught.

This alarming security gap obviously means that the southern border is far from secure, but rather porous and incredibly vulnerable. It also leaves Obama’s Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano, with egg on her face. After all, the former Arizona governor has repeatedly toured the southern border region guaranteeing that it is “as secure as it has ever been.”

It turns out that the U.S. government’s own technology has proven this to be far from the truth. The story comes from a mainstream newspaper that reports on the state-of-the art radar system that’s turned out to be quite an embarrassment for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In a sampling of a small stretch in southern Arizona, U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended fewer than half of the foreign migrants and smugglers who had crossed into the 150-mile area.

During a two week period in which the technology was used, 1,874 illegal immigrants were detained in the Sonora Desert while 1,962 in the same area evaded arrest and disappeared into the United States. “The number of ‘gotaways,’ as the Border Patrol calls those who escape apprehension, is both more precise and higher than official estimates,” the story says.

Operated from a predator surveillance drone, the airborne radar system is so precise that it detects and tracks individuals on foot from five miles overhead by using synthetic aperture radar to collect high-contrast black-and-white images in real time. The technology was developed to track Taliban fighters planting roadside bombs in Afghanistan, according to the news article, and has found new use along the Mexican border where it has revealed gaps in security.

This credible assessment of a border that’s far from secure could complicate the president’s effort to rush through legislation that reforms immigration laws by, among other things offering illegal aliens amnesty. To appease Americans and some concerned lawmakers, the commander-in-chief asserts that the nation’s borders are better patrolled than ever and that hundreds of thousands were apprehended last year.

The reality is that the southern border is a dangerous area with violence so out of control that both Mexican and American journalists have stopped reporting it out of fear that drug cartels will retaliate against them and their families. This benefits the Obama administration because it can skew statistics and general information to its benefit.

Judicial Watch has for years reported on the discrepancy between reality and the administration’s line that the Mexican border is secure. The truth is that overwhelmed federal agents are increasingly attacked by heavily armed drug smugglers and the U.S. Border Patrol has ordered officers to avoid the most crime-infested stretches because they’re “too dangerous” and patrolling them could result in an “international incident” of cross border shooting.

The violence has inevitably spilled into U.S. communities near the southern border, forcing local law enforcement agencies to create special units dedicated to combating criminal activity related to illegal immigration and Mexican drug cartels. In the absence of federal action, border crime has risen sharply in the last decade and will only get worse, according to statistics provided to congressional leaders by frustrated Arizona authorities.